Re: Ada, the best language with the not-so-best tool chain

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

The picture you summarised is too much simplified. Programming as a Human  
Activity is a lot impacted by human behaviours (*). May be more explicit  
tomorrow, as I feel tired right now, and will read the document you  
pointed, in its entirety in the mean time. Good pointer otherwise.


(*) Economy and the relation to it, is one part of the behaviour.


Le Fri, 19 Oct 2012 19:30:22 +0200, Simon Clubley  
<clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-earth.ufp> a écrit:

> On 2012-10-19, Patrick <patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org> wrote:
>>> Will die for whom? Not for every-one, and certainly not for people to
>>> which it values enough.
>>
>> This is just my uneducated opinion but I am guessing that companies like
>> Adacore are "riding out" projects started before the DOD dropped the Ada
>> mandate. It's great that the boeing 787 has Ada but if the 777 was C++  
>> would
>> they have switched to Ada? I think for the language to stay viable  
>> there has
>> to be a "grass roots" base and that starts with it being easy to use  
>> for the
>> everyday hobbyist.
>
> Patrick is absolutely correct about the latter bit and I've strongly  
> believed
> for some time there's a good element of truth to the first bit as well.
>
> I was going to have another go at trying to explain things, but instead I
> will just ask a simple question: What are the dominant programming  
> languages
> on the F-35 and why ?
>
> If people here will not listen to me, try listening to one of your own:
>
> https://journal.thecsiac.com/issue/53/158
>
> |About the Author:
> |
> |John H. Robb is the Senior Manager of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Air
> |Vehicle Software team at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Fort Worth.
>
> He says Ada was the better language. I certainly agree with that.
>
> He also says (on choosing C and C++ instead of Ada) :
>
> |Primary factors in this choice were training availability, tool  
> support, and
> |processor support. Another key factor was type casting, not as a  
> language
> |feature, but as a hiring feature. Many of the university students simply
> |refused to work Ada as it was not seen as a marketable experience base.  
> When
> |all factors were considered, C++ and C emerged as the languages of  
> choice
> |(these depending on the processor chosen).
>
> That's exactly what I and others have been trying to tell people here.
> I wish I had known about this article a couple of weeks ago.
>
> It's easy to ride on inertia for a while when you have a installed base  
> and
> can convince yourself that everything is ok. Unfortunately, in the end,  
> that
> usually only turns out to be a temporary thing.
>
> Ada is going to be around for existing systems for a long time. If you  
> want
> Ada to actually _grow_ instead of declining however, you need to expose
> people to Ada early on before the above opinions have had a chance to  
> form,
> and for the most part that means:
>
> (a) catching them while they are doing projects on their own time,
>
> (b) giving them tools which will work on the hobbyist/low end boards they
> will be experimenting with, and
>
> (c) understanding that hobbyists have a different ecosystem to the ones  
> you
> are used to, but which serves them well given the environment they  
> operate
> within and the projects they are typically interested in.
>
> Simon.
>


-- 
“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semi-colons.” [1]
“Structured Programming supports the law of the excluded muddle.” [1]
[1]: Epigrams on Programming — Alan J. — P. Yale University